Friday, 25 March 2016

I
was gearing up for a meeting at 10:30 am on Monday morning with an employee
from the Software team who had spent more than 4 yrs with the company and had
put up his papers last week. I knew the employee was fairly engaged with his
work, liked by his peers and was taking active participation in most of the
cross functional teams across his area of work. So what went wrong?

The
purpose of meeting him was to figure out the trigger of his exit and to explore
the options of retaining him by changing the project, location, etc.

What
stumped me while having the conversation with him was: he said: “you are the
first person who is genuinely interested in me and talking about staying back”.
After further quizzing him I learnt that his immediate supervisor’s knee jerk
reaction was “now that you have planned to go, go after some time and not
immediately” as it will hamper her ongoing project work. The dept head reacted
by saying “since the entire year you did so and so work I can’t give you more
than certain rating during PMS which will translate into 12% increment”. The
supervisor didn’t have the courage and cheek to go and influence the dept head
about retaining the employee nor the dept head bothered to check out the
trigger for his exit. He fairly assumed it would be money and started talking the
language of PMS 12% rise and so forth.

I
could tacitly gather lot of engagement drivers that needed to be worked
upon in the team with this conversation. However, what left me in greater
thoughts was about the emotional and psychological contract that the employee
had towards his work, supervisor, team and company which no longer was the same
post he put his papers and saw the reaction from his supervisor and dept head.

Could
the similar situation be handled in a different way? The answer is Yes. Maybe
the employee may have still left us and gone but he would have continued to be
our brand ambassador despite not working with us. How can one aim for that sort
of engagement when your ex employees talk highly about you while they are no
longer working in the same organization? The answer is simple and not rocket
science – make their stay including the exit as memorable as possible and treat
them with humane approach as they were welcomed in the system on the first day
of joining. Create enough memorable memories and experience to cherish so that
the employee continues to give his best productive performance even on the last
day of his work!

The
days are gone when employees used to work for single organizations for the rest
of their lives. Can we do something genuinely on retaining good talent? We all
know the cost of replacement and bad hire could cost the organization in the
long run.

What
are your thoughts? Your own experience? Best practices that we can learn…………..